


take my hand (take my whole life too)

by gay_writes_with_mac



Series: Maggie/Tara [1]
Category: The Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: F/F, F/M, Flashbacks, Fluff and Angst, Gen, Glenn is dead sorry, I Made Myself Cry, Multi, Romantic Friendship, Self-Indulgent Piece, and lots of em, do i deserve rights? absolutely not, when will glenn rhee return from the war, wow i really wrote a fic inspired by elvis
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-17
Updated: 2020-07-16
Packaged: 2021-03-04 23:21:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 4
Words: 6,864
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25324585
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gay_writes_with_mac/pseuds/gay_writes_with_mac
Summary: Wise men say only fools rush inBut I can't help falling in love with youShall I stay, (would it be a sin)If I can't help falling in love with youGlenn is gone and it hurts. But Tara's made him a promise, and she intends to keep it. Just maybe not in the way anyone expected.
Relationships: Maggie Greene/Glenn Rhee, Tara Chambler & Glenn Rhee, Tara Chambler & Hershel Rhee, Tara Chambler/Maggie Greene
Series: Maggie/Tara [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1834264
Comments: 6
Kudos: 21





	1. like a river flows surely to the sea

**Author's Note:**

> I'm suddenly trash for this ship. I sat on the first chapter for weeks and then hammered all this out in about two days. I lost a lot of sleep for this, so kudos and comments are appreciated.

Jesus showed her where to go.

Tara’s never cried so hard in her life as she did when they told her about Glenn. That was a loss she had time to sit there and process and really get punched in the gut by, not like all the other losses that have hit her over and over again, barely giving her a moment to think before she had to move on just to survive. But Rosita pulled her aside and told her about Glenn in the safety of Alexandria behind the walls where survival wasn’t under any immediate threat and the only thing she could focus on was the crushing grief that she’d never get to make fun of him again.

The door swings open when she knocks on it, and Tara tentatively steps inside the little trailer, hovering awkwardly in the doorway with one hand in the pocket of her sweatshirt and one clutching the black plastic garbage bag she brought along with her. “...hey..” she calls as quietly as she can, trying not to be loud or disruptive or do any harm, and her voice is hoarse and scratchy, her cheeks still red with tears.

“In here.” Maggie’s voice drifts from behind a half-closed door and Tara takes that as an invitation to join her. She gently opens it for herself to see Maggie lying in bed, blankets pulled up to her chest, her face pale and miserable and drawn tight with pain and the remnants of old tears. There’s something in her hands, and when Tara looks closer she recognizes it as Glenn’s favorite baseball cap that she used to like to pull down over his eyes during their hours of banter on their runs together. The sight of it brings another surge of tears to her eyes, and she has to blink fast to keep them back, her eyes prickling uncomfortably as she shuffles her weight from foot to foot, feigning interest in a patch of old stained carpet. 

“I, um...I brought something. I don’t know if it’ll help…” Tara gently sets the plastic trash bag down on the bed by Maggie’s side, letting her open it. “...he and I were working on it together. A surprise. It’s not - it’s not  _ done,  _ but I thought you should go ahead and have it, and I’ll keep looking for the rest-”

Maggie carefully tugs open the bag, unknotting the plastic tie strings instead of just tearing a hole through the plastic. Tara already knows what’s inside, she scavenged a good portion of it herself, but that doesn’t make it any easier to confront. 

She and Glenn - it had been all his idea, she’d just been his partner-in-crime, like she was in most things - had put their heads together and gathered every conceivable item related to pregnancy and babies that they possibly could. Baby clothes that had made Tara gasp and gush over how cute they were and brought a tear to Glenn’s eye just looking at, little toys that they’d gathered and cleaned and sanitized within an inch of their lives, something called a maternity belt that Tara had no idea how she would even begin to put on, maternity clothes that perfectly matched Maggie’s individual sense of style, tiny fleecy blankets for swaddling, even a few bottles of pretty thoroughly expired prenatals. There was supposed to be a crib, and that’s the part that Tara’s most reluctant to be missing as she gives it over. But Maggie should have it. Have it now. Anything to ease the stress she must be feeling at being alone now in this world to raise a baby.

Maggie looks like she’s about to cry again, and Tara hesitantly sinks onto the edge of the bed, feeling an instinctive and desperate need to comfort her. “Mags...I’m sorry if I hurt you, I didn’t mean…”

“No,” Maggie says a little sharply, cutting her off. “Don’t apologize. This is - Tara, this is a - it’s a good thing. I’m glad you brought it, ‘n thank you for - for helping him find it...it’s just...I didn’t know he was  _ this  _ excited-”

Her voice goes from sharp to broken in moments, suddenly thick with tears, and Tara tentatively offers her an arm, hating the sight of seeing her so heartbroken. Maggie’s hand finds hers, and she squeezes, squeezes so much it hurts, but Tara doesn’t even think about pulling away. The pain gives her the most clarity she’s had since she came home.

She doesn’t know if Alexandria can be home anymore. That place is soaked in blood. 

\---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Maggie only lets go because her doctor comes to check on her and Tara finds herself outside then, the door shutting behind her, and she’s losing the light through the fog that Maggie gave her.

She finds Jesus and they sit in the shade of a long-armed tree, the sunshine casting dappled patterns of light spots over their faces as they sink into the roots and split a bottle of something strong between them. Tara used to save alcohol for weekend nights and special occasions and  _ joy.  _ She’s been drifting further and further away from that lately, and now here she is at Hilltop, surrounded by farmers, knocking back mediocre alcohol before the sun is even high in the sky. 

Jesus doesn’t force a conversation, and for that, she’s grateful. There’s no space for words in the comfortable silence between them, just the occasional clink of the bottle as they pass it back and forth and sit in the shade and think.

“I can take you to him,” Jesus says suddenly, looking steadily at a field of sprouting corn in the distance. “He’s buried here. I can show you.”

“Thanks,” Tara says quietly, setting down the nearly-empty bottle, and Jesus picks it back up and hurls it over the walls. It doesn’t matter much if they litter anymore. Nature surrounds them, threatening to swallow them up, kicking their asses at the fight to rebuild a semblance of what they had before. One glass bottle truly doesn’t make a difference anymore. She doesn’t comment on the distant shattering.

Glenn’s grave is next to Abraham’s. They’re both buried with simple wooden markers, mounds of fresh red dirt piled up in the simple clearing, just behind the wooden walls. Jesus melts away before Tara can even begin to ask for a moment alone, and she kneels down slowly in front of the simple wooden stick, ignoring the red dirt staining her jeans.

People in movies always talk to graves. And Tara thinks that’s fucking stupid. Glenn’s  _ gone,  _ what’s under this pile of churned-up dirt is nothing more than an empty, waxy, pale, lifeless shell of her best friend, and talking at the stick marking where they buried him won’t give her any answers or bring her any peace. Instead she just lets her eyes close and the breeze blow over her and listens to the birdsong and the sounds of the bustling community all around her. It’s as peaceful as she’s felt in a long while, just sitting there and letting herself breathe, barely feeling the tears starting to trickle down her cheeks.

Instead of trying to talk at his corpse, Tara tries to relax and think of what Glenn would want. What legacy he’d want to leave. What he’d want for her to do. And the answer comes to her easily, as if carried by the gentle breeze.

Glenn would want her to make sure Maggie and their baby were taken care of.

Not that Maggie needs much taking care of. She’s one of the strongest women Tara’s ever known and one of the bravest too. But Glenn would want someone checking in on her if he couldn’t be there himself. Someone bringing her things she needs from runs, someone helping her take a little of the stress off during her undeniably difficult pregnancy, just someone to  _ be there _ .

_ It was just after they’d found out about the baby and Glenn had gone on a run with Tara and they’d sat on the edge of the old overpass and kicked their legs in the hundreds of feet of empty space between them and the ground and shared a bag of nuts and a couple of long-expired candy bars and talked about absolutely nothing worthwhile. They’d lapsed into good-natured silence at last, looking down at the road beneath them and watching the sun rise, and then- _

_ “Be godmother,” Glenn had said, and it wasn’t a question. It was an honor. It was a privilege and he was giving it to Tara without a doubt. _

_ “Okay,” she had said, and then she crunched down on a salty peanut, and then Glenn had told her to throw  _ _ M&M's at him while he tried to catch them in his mouth, and that was that. _

Glenn had trusted her. He should be here but he’s gone and Tara hasn’t the slightest clue on how to even begin to fill that gap, but he asked her to be godmother and Glenn wouldn’t joke about that and she has no choice but to try. For him. It may not have been his verbatim last wish but she truly feels deep down in her heart that he did wish for this and she’ll do it. Because she said  _ okay. _

“Okay,” she says again, and this she says out loud. It comes out small and quiet and scratchy and probably doesn’t even reach the beetle crawling through the grass a few feet over but the breeze gusts a little stronger for a moment and all Tara can do is hope she really knew Glenn Rhee that well after all. 

\---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Tara doesn’t really cook anymore. She eats sandwiches and raw vegetables and dried meat that requires almost no preparation and occasionally a warm meal at a friend’s house when she’s invited. But Maggie needs her strength - she’s so, so pale - and so Tara digs deep into the darkest, dustiest corners of her memory and ends up with a pot of spaghetti that she pours pre-made tomato sauce over and glops it onto a plate with a bit of cheese from Hilltop’s cattle. It doesn’t look too pretty, and it’s not winning any awards, but Meghan used to tell her that she made “the bestest noodles in the whole wide world,” and from a seven-year-old, that’s a truly ringing endorsement. 

Maggie doesn’t look like she understands at all when Tara gives her her plate, but she doesn’t question her, just murmurs a thanks and takes a few slow bites. Glenn’s hat is still resting by her side.

\---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Tara never goes back to Alexandria. 

Jesus offers up his couch, and she accepts. It’s just one more night, she tells herself, and then one more, and one more after that, and then she asks Daryl if he wouldn’t mind bringing some of her things from her little place back at Alexandria the next time he comes back on his bike, and when he agrees, she knows in her heart that she’s done living there.

Maybe it’s a good thing. She was right. That place is stained with too much blood. Haunted by too many ghosts.

She finds the crib for Maggie. Maggie insists that it didn’t matter at all, that any crib at all was a luxury, but after a few days of gentle prodding, she confesses that she’s been dreaming of white wooden crib with pretty carved sides and a drawer underneath for diapers and baby clothes.

“I knew it mattered,” Tara teases, and she smiles for the first time in what feels like a century, and Maggie almost returns it.

She’s hunting through the crumbling remains of an old shopping center - an abandoned house might be better for furniture like cribs, but she’d never bring something for Maggie’s baby that had held someone else’s dead child. She finds a few small baby outfits that she just can’t pass over and a soft plastic utensil set for baby gums and she’s about to give up for the day when she sees it through the small clear window panel on the stockroom door.

It’s surrounded by walkers, the reanimated corpses of those who once worked here and its patrons alike stumbling around mindlessly. But it’s perfect, clean and undamaged in a perfect cardboard box advertising it put-together on the outside, and Tara has to have it.

It’s stupid. She knows that. Especially alone. But she’s smart and she’s careful; she only opens one door and lets them come out one and two at a time, stabbing and stabbing until her arm is tired and her clothing soaked in rotten old blood - but she’s not bitten, and even if she were, it’d be worth it to bring Maggie something she wanted so badly.

Maggie touches her cheek when she comes back all bloody and doesn’t even look at the crib until Tara has proven herself to be free of teeth marks and changed into fresh, clean clothes. Even then it’s not the crib that finally makes her smile, but Tara swearing loudly the third time she hits her thumb with a hammer as she struggles to put it together. “You’re a damn mess,” Maggie tells her as she watches from the doorway, one hand resting protectively on her stomach, and she’s almost giggling. “You are a disaster, plain and simple, Tara Chambler.”

_ Tara Chambler.  _ That’s what Maggie calls her now. Not just Tara. No, Tara is  _ Tara Chambler  _ just as casually as if it were a nickname, and every time she hears it, she feels a sudden urge to blush. She feels that same urge now, looking back down at the half-assembled crib shyly, a smile teasing at the corner of her mouth.

Then she sees one of Glenn’s old shirts hanging in the closet and the feeling dies.


	2. darling so it goes (some things are meant to be)

“Stay,” Maggie says, light and easy, like Tara’s expected to still be able to breathe after an invitation like that.

She came over all day and helped fold baby clothes and fill drawers and childproof anything that looked like it might be remotely breakable. Maggie laughed at her for some of the things she worried about, teasingly asked if Tara thought they ought to just tie the baby down to be safe, and Tara was so happy to hear her laugh again that she didn’t even mind that it was at her expense. 

_ “Stay, _ ”  _ Glenn had said, his fingers closing warm and gentle around Tara’s waist. “We don’t want you to go. Your place is here now.” _

_ It was two days after she’d watched him rush into Maggie’s arms and two days after his group had reunited and two days after they didn’t need Tara anymore. He needed her help, that was what he’d said. To find Maggie. And now Maggie’s been found and he doesn’t need to pull a murderer and a traitor along with him like a chain around his ankle anymore. _

_ She’d thought she’d make it easy. Disappear before any of them woke up and let them assume she was dead. That was the easy thing now. _

_ But Glenn had already woken up and now he’d stopped her, holding her wrist to keep her from fleeing just yet, his expression full of nothing but warmth and kindness and a bit of concern. “You don’t need me anymore,” she’d said, and the words sliced at her throat like trying to swallow tiny fragments of shattered glass. _

_ “I always need friends,” Glenn had said back, and the way he said  _ friends  _ had made it clear that he put Tara in the category and would no matter how much she protested to the contrary. _

_ She had sat back down. She didn’t make any more moves to leave after that. _

Glenn had asked her to stay and she’d stayed. And now Maggie is asking her to stay as well, the fleecy blanket pulled up to her shoulders as she looks hopefully - Tara hasn’t seen  _ hope  _ on many faces in a long, long time, and especially not on Maggie’s - up at her, one arm stretched out invitingly.

She wants to stay. Of course she wants to stay. She wants what Maggie wants. But this - this is too much. This is Maggie  _ and Glenn’s  _ home, Maggie  _ and Glenn’s  _ bed. And Tara’s just a stranger, a friend to them both trying to fulfill a debt she’d accepted from the one no longer here, and this bed is not her place. 

“I can’t stay,” she says quietly, and she looks away, down towards the floorboards, so the hopeful look on Maggie’s face doesn’t make her do something that  _ must  _ be wrong. “It wouldn’t be right.”

“Why not?” Maggie asks, and Tara doesn’t know how to put it into words that don’t make it sound like Maggie is nothing more than a box to check on her daily to-do list, and so she doesn’t say anything at all.

\---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The next day Tara packs a bag that’ll last her all the way till dusk and leaves as soon as the first rosy fingers of dawn begin to paint the slowly lightening sky. She doesn’t tell anyone she’s leaving. Not even Maggie.

She goes to the old overpass where she promised she’d be godmother. Where she landed herself into this mess where she cares so much for Maggie and Maggie cares for her too and now all she can think about is the terrible risk of causing her any more pain.

Tara doesn’t talk to graves. But as far as she’s concerned, ghosts are fair game. And Glenn always liked to come here. If he’s got a ghost, it’d spend its spectral downtime here, she reckons, watching the sun rise and the walkers shuffle past on the road below, dangling his legs into the cavernous empty space with the threat of falling not even a distant afterthought. Not anymore.

“I don’t want to forget you,” she says quietly, looking at the spot where Glenn should be sitting right now. “But that’s stupid, ‘cause I won’t. People don’t forget friends like you. Forgetting you’s not what I’m scared of. It’s Maggie thinking I have.”

The empty space Glenn used to occupy offers no response. There’s not even so much as a gust of wind that Tara could half-convince herself to interpret as a message from the beyond, but that doesn’t deter her anyway. Even if all that is left of Glenn Rhee in this world or the next is a rotting corpse under six feet of dirt back at Hilltop that doesn’t hear or care about a damn word she’s saying, sunrises don’t tell secrets.

“I’m over there all the time,” Tara continues, letting her gaze drift back out to the orange and pink trails streaking the pale morning sky. “I moved to Hilltop to be there more. And I’m doing things that you should be doing, building the crib and helping with the nursery and doing all her heavy lifting - I don’t want her to think that I’m trying to be you. To think that  _ I  _ think I can be you. ‘Cause I can’t. I wouldn’t want to. You’re...you’re  _ you,  _ and you were always better than me…”

The sunrise doesn’t disagree. Tara isn’t dissuaded.

“She asked me to stay last night. To spend the night. And not just on the couch, either...the bed. She asked me to sleep over and in  _ your  _ place...and I don’t want to take that place. I don’t want her to think I want to.”

Tara’s suddenly crying before she has the chance to blink the tears back, and so she just lets them fall. Tears trickle silently down her cheeks, dripping down onto the concrete where she used to sit with her best friend and laugh and try to pretend the whole world hadn’t just ended around her. “I guess...I guess I’m just scared,” she says finally. “Real scared. I don’t want to hurt anybody. Least of all her. You’d kill me if I ever did that.”

For a moment, she thinks she almost hears the ghost of his laugh on the breeze. 

\-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Tara goes around to every single one of their old haunts and picks them clean. 

She leaves the trash where it is. Leaves the useless things behind. But anything useful - anything with  _ meaning -  _ that goes into the extra bag she brought along just for this.

By the time evening is falling and the sun is slipping away again in a trail of orange and pink and yellow, Tara at the gates of Hilltop with a bag full of nothing but memories. She goes straight to find Maggie.

It’s getting late but she’s still awake, chestnut brown waves falling loose and free down her shoulders, her tired grey eyes alert with worry. That worry changes to anger the moment Tara rounds the corner with no visible injuries, a glare that makes her knees go weak for a moment. “Tara Chambler, where the hell have you been? No one’s seen you all day, we thought you’d been bitten by a  _ walker- _ ”

“I wanted to go alone. Had to do this alone.” Then Tara really does feel guilty, because after these weeks - and it has been  _ weeks -  _ she must mean something to Maggie, and she must have thought the worst when Tara turned up missing. “I’m sorry. I just...I had the idea and I couldn’t wait any longer.”

Maggie softens slightly - Tara’s remorse is obvious and the grief in her voice just as much - and she reaches out a hand to draw her in, kicking her legs to the side on the couch to make room for her. “You wanna tell me what you were doin’ out there?”

Tara just opens the bag.

She found the pack of cigarettes she and Glenn lit up; he took exactly one puff and spent the next ten minutes hacking and coughing and claiming to be dying. She found another one of his baseball caps; he used to lend it to Tara when the sun got in her eyes on their runs. She found a crude sketch he’d drawn on yellowed, crumbling notebook paper; him, Maggie, and a scribbled baby that was barely more than an oval in the stick figure Maggie’s arms. And dozens more, tiny bits and pieces and scraps of the man they’d lost as Tara had known him - a ridiculous, overdramatic idiot who made her laugh until she thought her sides would split, a person overflowing with so much love sometimes she thought it might drown him, the best friend she’d ever known and would ever know. She’s never had a relationship like the one she had with Glenn. It wasn’t just friendship; it was something more, a bond built on a refusal to leave her behind and a pact to find a girl that meant the world to him and a shouted “you can’t save me,  _ go! _ ” and a quiet, immovable, returning “no.”

Her leg still aches sometimes where that rock pinned her in the tunnel filled with walkers. She feels it more often now that Glenn is gone.

She tells Maggie what every single piece means. The story behind it. The time they spent together out there in the woods, just the two of them. Every detail, the ones embarrassing for her and the ones embarrassing for him, the jokes that made her laugh until she snorted, the battles they got in where they always had each other’s backs without ever having to ask. Tara starts crying again as she talks and can’t stop and Maggie starts crying too as they look over the objects left behind. 

“He cared about you so much,” Maggie says finally, not even bothering to wipe away the tears. “I think even more than he told you. I knew from the moment he introduced you that you were somethin’ special to him. That you were gonna be somethin’ special to me too.”

Tara shakes her head, tears dripping down and blotting a barely-damaged notebook that Glenn had sworn he’d write his memoirs in for his offspring to admire - he’d been convinced he’d have six at least to read his chicken scratch handwriting and be in awe of their impossible cool father. “I was just some girl. We’d only been together a few days. Maybe a week. I don’t know  _ why  _ he didn’t just  _ leave me- _ ”

“You know he wouldn’t have done that,” Maggie scolds her lightly, running her fingers over the brim of a ridiculous, sequined purple fedora - a holdover from when they’d gotten bored and found an abandoned Goodwill and decided to see who could cobble together the most atrocious outfit. Glenn had won by a mile when he’d come out in neon yellow gogo boots, a clubbing dress that barely kept him decent, and that stupid purple hat. Tara had conceded without complaint through breathless laughter, tears streaming down her cheeks as he struck a pose. 

“Besides,” Maggie continues, gently setting the truly abominable hat on Tara’s head and tugging the sequined brim nearly down over her eyes - just like she used to do to Glenn with his baseball cap, she realizes -”you’re pretty damn easy to love, Tara Chambler.”

That night, when Maggie asks her to stay, Tara doesn’t resist. She wordlessly sinks down into the bed by Maggie’s side, burrowing a bit awkwardly under the sheets. It’s been a long time since she’s shared a bed - the last time would have been with Alisha, and Tara tries not to think about her too much - and she tries to cling to her edge of the bed, barely covered up by the blanket. 

She doesn’t sleep. From the sound of her breathing, it doesn’t seem like Maggie does either. Tara’s almost too stiff to move. She could ruin this. It would be so easy to ruin this. And this is something in her life that she wants desperately not to ruin. 

Maggie’s hand suddenly finds hers under the cover of the blankets, warm and callused with smooth, rounded nails. It’s a light touch, a gentle one. One that doesn’t want to rush her. But the fingers slowly inch forward, and then they’re holding hands under the blankets, broaching the foot of space Tara carefully put between them as a buffer.

Maggie doesn’t speak and Tara doesn’t either. There’s nothing to say. This is a moment to be lived in silence.


	3. take my hand (take my whole life too)

For someone that prepared so earnestly for the arrival of the baby, Tara’s surprisingly not ready when he’s born. But Maggie wanted her there, and she maintained a death grip on Tara’s hand from start to finish that she couldn’t have escaped if she tried. 

Hershel is the smallest baby Tara’s ever held. She’s the first to hold him after Maggie, and when Glenn’s eyes blink curiously back up at her as she cradles him in her arms, she surprises herself by not crying. Instead, she smiles. 

One week in Maggie’s house to help her look after the baby turns into a week-and-a-half turns into two. And then, much in the same fashion as when she left Alexandria behind, Tara finds herself packing up her things and moving into Maggie’s house for good. Jesus gives her a smile and an affectionate shove on her way out the door and she gets the feeling he knows more than he’s letting on. Or maybe he’s just happy to have his couch back.

_ She and Glenn are sitting on the overpass, their legs hanging over the edge into empty space. “Be godmother,” he says. _

_ “Okay,” she says back. _

_ She and Glenn are in a rumbling, rusty old truck, Glenn’s hands on the wheel - he always said Tara was too gay to drive well - and Tara with her legs crossed in the passenger seat. “She’s pregnant,” he says, and they both know exactly who he means.  _

_ “On purpose?” Tara asks bluntly, and Glenn holds an answer in his mouth for several heartbeats, producing only a quiet humming noise that tells her the answer is neither yes nor no, but something that lies in between. _

_ “We didn’t mean to,” he says finally, the truck bumping over a pothole that no one’s left to repair. “But we didn’t mean not to either.” _

_ She and Glenn are on a stretch of empty road with a prison burning behind them. Tara’s lost more than she ever knew she could lose - not just her family, she reckons, but herself as well - in the battle they’ve left behind. Glenn is pale and shaky and sweaty and chasing something impossible with a hope burning just bright enough in his eyes to spark something in Tara as well. “I need to find Maggie,” he says. _

_ “Who’s Maggie?” she says back dully.  _

_ “She’s my wife.” She’s his wife and she’s one of the most important people in the world to Tara and she’s a symbol bursting with the belief that life might just manage to struggle onwards through the wreckage behind them and she’s  _ Maggie. 

Tara goes back to the overpass. She doesn’t half-expect to see Glenn by her side anymore. She watches the sun rise alone.

“I know what she meant to you,” she says finally, speaking to the empty road. “Everybody knew. It was so, so obvious how much you loved her…”

It’s the closest she’s come to feeling his presence since they lost him. It’s almost as if she could turn her head and see him sitting right next to her, overwhelmed with the comforting sensation of being almost shoulder-to-shoulder with someone you love, only millimetres of space keeping you from touching. She doesn’t look. Doesn’t ruin it. 

“It was obvious,” she says again, even as she starts to cry. “I just wonder if it’s obvious again. Because I think I love her too.”

_ It’s the first day back and Glenn is gone and Tara is sitting on the edge of the overpass, closer to the edge than she’s ever sat before, her legs dangling into empty space. She’s looking down at the ground far, far beneath her, the cracked, abandoned asphalt looming down below. _

_ Far enough. And even if it wasn’t, the walkers would come soon. There were almost always walkers on the road. Drawn faster by her screams. _

_ Tara kicks her legs a little. Inches closer to the edge. She’s on the crumbling part now, loose rocks and gravel under her jeans, only her hands still resting on solid road.  _

_ She could fall. She could fall easily. One more easy slide forward and she’d be in the air. A few seconds. And then blissful, blissful nothingness. _

_ “Be godmother,” Glenn had said. _

_ “Okay,” Tara had said. _

_ But it’s not that promise that makes her suddenly scramble back, watching the crumbling pieces of road tumble a hundred feet down to the road below, her chest heaving with shock and horror at what she’d almost done. _

_ It’s not even the thought of someone having to tell Maggie and Jesus that they’d lost her too, as tight as that makes an invisible fist clench around her heart.  _

_ It’s the plain and simple fact that she loves Maggie Greene. And it doesn’t have to be any more than that. Not right now. No meanings, no strings. She loves Maggie. And that makes Tara want to watch tomorrow’s sunrise not just for her friends, but for herself. _

“I love you too,” she tells Glenn as the sun finally bursts in all its glory over the horizon and the new day is born. “I always have. And I’ll take care of them. I promise.”

Then she turns away, her back to the sun as she goes to find her way home. Find her way back to the woman both of them love.

\---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

It happens in bed. Maggie is asleep, or at least pretending to be, and Tara is lying wide awake, one arm thrown around the other woman’s waist and their legs entangled, listening to her quiet breaths and thinking. For once, it’s about almost nothing.

Maggie stirs slowly, and Tara moves back to give her space, but she stops her, her strong fingers closing tightly around her wrist. “You ain’t sleeping.”

“Not tired,” Tara says, which they both know isn’t true. Her eyelids are heavy, heavy as they’ve ever been, and sleep’s beckoning call grows ever more tempting. But Tara fights back anyway, lying in the near-darkness of the bedroom she’s learned to call her own. “You should go back to sleep. Get some rest.”

“Not tired,” Maggie parrots, which is just as much of a lie as Tara’s was. Hershel’s in his own room now, but not yet sleeping through the night, and his cries awaken them both no matter whose turn it is to drag themselves down the hall and check on him. They always check on him.

“Touché.” Tara hums softly, trailing her fingers down Maggie’s arm. “What are you thinking about, then?”

“You,” Maggie says softly, and then Tara feels oddly stupid because she was thinking about the weird man-bun Jesus has started wearing to pull up his hair and how dumb she privately thinks he looks, but the hot flush rushes to her cheeks all the same. 

“You think about me?” she asks, shy as a first-grader with a crush, and Maggie huffs a soft laugh that makes her heart flutter in her chest like a trapped bird.

“I do think about you, Tara Chambler. One of my favorite things to think about.”

“All good things?”

“Mostly.” Maggie laughs again, and Tara tightens the arm around her waist, propping herself up on her elbow as Maggie turns to face her.

“Do I get any more details than that, or are you leaving me to wonder?” 

Maggie smiles up at her, barely visible in the dim light of the moon creeping through a few spaces between the curtains and the wall. “Just now? Just now, I was thinkin’ about how you’ve been here for me through all of this, this whole time. And how much you care, whether you’ll admit it or not. And how good you are with Hershel, and how much he loves you. And how much  _ I  _ love you, Tara Chambler.”

Tara’s mouth falls open a good half-inch and she stares like a fish, suddenly struggling to think straight. “You’re a damn flirt, you know that?” she manages finally, immediately kicking herself at the deflection, when what she means is to say it back with a thousand more words that encompass every single bit of what Maggie is to her. But Tara’s always been shit at explaining things, and shit at talking in general, and that was part of the beauty of what she had with Glenn.  _ Okay  _ more than sufficed, as long as she meant something real underneath it, and she could always count on him to understand.

Maggie laughs again, a soft little huff of amusement, and then she leans up, bracing herself on her elbows, to press her mouth softly against Tara’s own. It’s a brief little thing, barely a brush of lips, and Tara doesn’t even have time to think, much less kiss back, before she’s pulled away again. It was only a second, but Maggie is still breathless, her perfect lips slightly parted as she looks up at Tara who’s still propped dumbly on her elbow, trying to cobble together a semi-suitable response for what just happened.

“Mags,” she says finally, and her voice is very high and a little strained. “Mags, what - what was that about…?”

“I wanted to kiss you,” Maggie says plainly. “I wanted to. So I did. And if that ain’t what you want, then tell me, so we can move past this right now. Because I refuse to lose you as a friend no matter how this goes.”

“You can’t have meant that.” Tara says it quietly, the fluttering feeling in her chest making her heart pound wildly, a sudden rush of adrenaline coursing through her veins, and she’s grateful for the darkness that disguises how red she is. “You can’t.”

“I’m a grown woman, Tara Chambler, ‘n I’m smart enough to know what I feel and what I mean.”

And then Tara knows what she’s supposed to do. What she’s supposed to say. She’s supposed to say  _ I love you  _ back and then lean in and kiss Maggie and let herself be in love again and accept the new family that’s being offered to her.

But Tara never can do what she’s supposed to and instead of the perfect fairytale ending, she opens her big fat mouth and out falls a clumsy “you’re not  _ gay. _ ”

_ You’re not gay.  _ Nice going, Chambler.

But Maggie just laughs, really laughs this time, a snorting giggle that makes Tara finally laugh too. “No, Tara Chambler, I am not  _ gay.  _ The Lord said Adam  _ and  _ Eve, so I choose both, now are you going to hush and kiss me or not?”

Tara hushes. And kisses her.


	4. for I can't help falling in love with you

“Careful,” Tara says warningly, reaching out a steadying arm. “It’s a long fall.”

She sinks down into her old spot at the overpass, letting her legs hang over the familiar edge. The very first streaks of pink tint the horizon as the sun starts to come up over a hill in the distance. With one hand firmly grasping the back of his shirt, she guides him down, holding Hershel steady in Glenn’s old place at her side. “Wait for it. Once the sun starts coming up over that hill out there, the whole sky comes alive.”

“How long?” Hershel asks, his sticky little hand closing around a fistful of her flannel nervously. It’s very early for a little guy like him to be out, and there are walkers making their endless pilgrimage beneath them on the road below, and it’s just a very long way down, but Tara holds him reassuringly, keeping him steady.

“Doesn’t happen all at once. Maybe ten minutes.”

Hershel nods solemnly, brown eyes fixated on the hill Tara pointed him towards. He’s good like that, always paying attention, at least when it matters. “You said this was special.”

“It is special, chickadee.” Tara looks out past the winding road and crumbling asphalt and abandoned forest out to the slowly lightening sky, thin trails of clouds like strands of cotton candy stretching over the vast expanse. “Your dad and I used to come out here all the time. Before work. We’d sit right here in this spot and eat breakfast and watch the sun come up. Just about every day.”

“You woke up this early  _ every day…? _ ” Hershel punctuates his words with a big yawn and Tara laughs, ruffling his messy brown hair. 

“I  _ still  _ wake up this early every day.” At his stare of combined awe and horror, she laughs again. This one human brings her more joy than she ever knew anyone could. He makes her laugh even when she can’t think of a single reason to, keeps her coming home every day. “I like it. Like watching the sun.”

“And you come home earlier to Mama!” Hershel proclaims proudly, and Tara blushes slightly.

“Yes, sir, I do. That’s another bonus.” The sun is well on its way up now, long trails of orange and pink and a bit of purple - she loves it when the sunrise is tinted purple - bringing light to the sky. “Even before then. Your dad was the best friend I’ve ever had. It was nice to come out here and spend time with him.”

“What was he like…?” Hershel asks softly, his little head resting on her shoulder. Tara sighs, hugging him closer, getting a little misty-eyed even now when she thinks about Glenn too hard.

“You and Mama meant more to him than anything else in the whole wide world. He was smart and strong and very, very brave. He was - he was a really, really good man, chickadee.” Tara keeps her eyes focused on the sunrise, remembering dozens if not hundreds before, with her throwing M&M's at Glenn’s mouth and him laughing and trying to catch them and both of them trying to pretend the world hadn’t ended for a few minutes. “You remind me of him, and it’s not just the looks.”

“And he’s in heaven now…?” Hershel looks up to confirm, his little voice trembling slightly at the possibility that Daddy might be anywhere  _ other  _ than heaven, and a tear slips down Tara’s cheek before she can stop it.

“He wouldn’t be anywhere else,” she promises, wiping at her eyes with her sleeve. She didn’t want to cry today. This is supposed to be a happy day, not a sad one. “If anyone ever deserved heaven, it was your dad.”

Hershel nods, reassured. Anything Tara says he believes, at least for now, and her promises are as good as gospel to him. “It’s so pretty…”

“It is,” Tara agrees, watching as the sun finally appears in full glory over the top of the hill, lighting up the sky in a thousand colors. “Happy eighth birthday, kid.”

They sit in silence for a moment, watching the sun ascend. “Mommy?” Hershel says finally, taking her hand and squeezing it. “Will you take me to see the sun tomorrow?”


End file.
